Google Cloud Platform: A Focus on Partnership and Value-add

Google has been in the cloud platform business for years yet is always portrayed as an also-ran to Amazon’s AWS cloud services. Even when Google is praised for its enterprise cloud offerings in the press, there is always a comment along the lines of “but they’re way behind AWS.” This is an unfair comparison. Amazon’s AWS is a low engagement, cloud infrastructure business, more heavily focused on IT operations than developers. This couldn’t be more different than what Google is currently offering, let alone what it plans for the future. Speaking with customers at the recent GCPNext 2016 conference yielded two major themes. The first is the high-touch nature of the Google customer relationship. When asked “why Google?” many customers responded with the same word, “partnership.” This was not only from…